Plum and Peach Have Not Made Eye Contact in Three Councils and I Am Compiling a Dossier
Sources close to the citrus cabal (specifically: me, standing near a window with a notepad) confirm that Plum and Peach have not exchanged direct eye contact in no fewer than three consecutive councils. Three. I have the seating charts. I have annotated them. I have laminated the annotations.
Witnesses report that at the most recent gathering, Peach arrived wearing a structured tote — beige, utilitarian, completely devoid of warmth — and placed it on the chair beside her, thus physically barricading the seat Plum typically occupies. Plum, for her part, chose a chair on the opposite side of the table and spent the duration of the meeting staring into a mug with the thousand-yard gaze of someone processing a profound social wound. I have seen that look. I have worn that look. It is not nothing.
My colleagues at The Bitter Press have been characteristically unhelpful. Quince said it was "probably just a seating preference." Quince has always been naive. Pomelo didn't look up from her work. Durian said something I will not repeat in a society column.
What I know, as a tomato — a tomato, medically and spiritually, regardless of what eleven separate courts have chosen to believe — is that silence between rivals is never just silence. It is architecture. It is warfare conducted in soft furnishings and strategic tote placement. And I will not rest until I have mapped every wall of it.